My university has an agreement with Microsoft so that students, following courses from the computer science department, may download from a selection of Microsoft software for free. This includes Windows Vista, which is available in the Business version.

I am interested in the current operating systems so I got my copy and have been using it for a couple of months now on my Dell Inspiron 6400 - a core duo 2 (T5600) with 1024 mb ram and ATI X1400 video. I tried both the 32 and 64 bit versions but I couldn’t really distinguish between them.

However, I’ve decided to go back to Windows XP. Here are my experiences with Vista.

Pros

• Installation is fast due to the new image format
• Microsoft has improved the general security by adding User Account Control
• The visual layout of the Business version, even, is much better than Windows XP
• Windows Explorer is great. In particular I like the new grouping features.
• The resource monitor is awesome.
• More informative dialog on file copy operations.
• There are multiple under-the-hood improvements: IO and memory priorities, and delayed startup for services…

Cons

• Cleartype is highly embedded into Vista and, it seems, cannot be turned off completely. Furthermore, due to the fonts which are used, it seems that partially turning off cleartype give font renderings which are worse than for e.g. Windows XP
• Although installation is fast, per default a performance check is scheduled just before Vista is started for the first time. This effectively kills all the time you have saved, comparing to an XP installation. I honestly don’t see why it is necessary to perform a five-minute benchmarking of the PC.
• User Account Control is ANNOYING. I consider myself a power user and so I know which prompts to accept and which not to accept. It is possible to turn the feature off, but the Windows security center will continue to nag you if you do so.
• The picture gallery application is VERY slow compared to its Windows XP counterpart. I’m talking about 10-15 seconds wait time just to start a dias show. In XP it was instantaneous.
• It is slow. In spite of the new kernel features, delayed startup services, monitoring of usage patterns I found myself waiting more with Vista than I did with XP. I use the same programs, solve the same tasks but still it is slower than XP.

These are just some of the pros and cons.

Many of the drawbacks have made me consider just moving back to XP but I’d decided to stick with Vista since it actually worked quite well for my needs, although it did not contain anything new, which I really could not do without.
That was until today when I read some of the criticisms on Windows Vista.

The entry on CD and DVD burning made me worry, in particular.

We recently finished a report on a piece of software we developed in a course at school. I was asked to burn a copy of the source code for our professor so, obviously, I used Vista’s build-in burn tool (which integrates very nicely by the way).

The criticism on CD and DVD burning is that Vista use a special MS format for unformatted CDs, which ours was. So in effect we have handed in a CD which cannot be used by our professor. They are all on UNIX (SunOS). We have send him a zip archive containing the code and are hoping for the best.

In the meantime I will be installing Windows XP yet again.

Tags: windows vista, slow, problems, windows live file system, msdnaa